Yes!

That comes in fourth for the dino. Maybe because I had already seen those signs and approvingly commented on them somewhere else I can't remember here in The Gulch.
Or maybe somewhere outside Gulch. You know, the thing. C'mon, man! I'm in my Seventies just like President What's-His-Name is. Him and The New Cackles.

How could everyone NOT see?
Even Rand asks the question...

For me dino, those two combined with the world's most expensive nursing home.

Love it....good use of resources that are otherwise a waist.

IMO almost everyone is underestimating the inflation issue. But for different reasons.

Back when we started tracking "inflation" it was a measure of how much it took to maintain a standard of living. But in the 1980s and 1990s the government changed the formula in specific and obviously faulty ways.

1. They removed the "maintaining a standard" aspect. In this change they decided to allow themselves to substitute cheaper and inferior or lower quality goods if the regular goods increased. The example I like here is steak. If you eat steak, say 3-4 times a week, and steak prices go up, then your cost of living - your cost to maintain your standard of living - has increased, ceteris paribus.

Prior to the change, that would register as inflation. After, they would look ad say "well, ground beef is still beef and is cheaper, so we will swap those" and the inflation is hidden.

The next major change is more egregious. You could make an argument for a second metric to cover the decline in standard of living at a fixed price level, and it may be useful. But this one, this one is absurd.

For their next trick they removed "out of pocket" expenses. The primary example here is the federal regulations that changed the formulation of gasoline that caused a 10 cents per gallon in crease in the price of gasoline. Under the old formula, that rise would have been reflected in the inflation figures.

But under the new method they specifically excluded government mandated increases. Even though we paid more, because the government mandated it, it isn't counted as inflation. There is no logical and non-nefarious reason I have found to justify that move.

But there is a reason underlying all of it. Some here will remember the inflation of the 70s and early 80s. For those who don't, know that it is the low benchmark everyone uses for bad inflation. Well, when we aren't using one of the many countries that run socialist and hyper inflate from just raw printing of currency.

So it was top of mind for people in the 1980s and 1990s. However, there is a deeper issue. Much of federal government spending is tied to that "inflation" figure. Because back then it made sense - it was a reflection of the change in maintaining a standard of living. Thus if, for example, you wanted to retire and not do so with a decrease in your standard of living, you wanted your retirement income/fund to "keep up" with it.

However, combine federal mandates to tie spending unavoidably to that metric with high increases in that metric and anyone with even a basic understanding of economics can predict what happened next. This creates a strong incentive for that number to not rise, and ideally to shrink.

So they shrunk it.

How much, though? Well, if you use the original basket and formula from pre-1980s ... its bad. Around/In 1980 under the old formula we peaked at nearly 15%. Using that same formula/basket we are currently around 13%.

Yes, we are in the same realm of inflation right now as we were in the late 1970s. And everyone is worried it is getting worse, and think we are tickling 5%.

To point out that the incentive I mentioned above isn't merely theoretically, consider this quote from 2011:

“The need to break the back of that (budgetary debt) spiral is as dire now as was the need for Paul Volcker to break the back of inflation in the 1980s” - Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher, April 2011

They knew of the problem, and they knew they changed the methods and formula to change the outcome to "handle" for the budget problem.

If you've ever wondered why the reported inflation doesn't seem to match what your wallet sees, now you have an idea why. Because the official inflation figure is not meant to.

But wait, there is more!

What happened? The wealthy went for the a form of wealth they knew would stand up after the inflation problem subsided. They bough real estate. A lot of it, and at the higher prices only they could afford. Does that sound familiar?

At the time those who had staunchly advocated the "loose/easy money" policies and the "we must make money cheap to fight unemployment" stand of Nixon (side note: one of his advisers described Nixon's exotics as "conservative men with liberal ideas", Keynes, and government spending/control types all blamed OPEC and oil prices. But really, it was our own government that did it to us with cheap money and profligate government spending to "save" us from inflation.

It started under Nixon but was made worse by the doubling down of Carter. It took several years from the onset of it, then overall a bit over a decade to peak and reverse. The reverse was mainly due to the massive reversal of said policies by the Reagan administration.

Of note here, we see the same effect with the Trump policies. It bought us time, but the loss of those has allowed it to resume heading in the wrong direction.

And what do we see now? We see the same levels of inflation (both in terms of our wallets and the official numbers) the 1970s, brought about by quantitatively eased money and absurdly low interest rates; we see a scapegoat commodity being set up to be the problem; we see the wealthy flocking to real estate as a hedge; and we see the lefties laying the groundwork to shift the blame to those wealthy for buying those properties.

We see stagnated employment numbers; we see prices rising; and we see the lefties calling for preventing the market from recovering.

It won't just be this administration that has to deal with it. IMO this one is trying desperately to shed blame and kick the can down the road. Meanwhile their attempts to "help" will only make it worse - just as was done in the 2008-2012 years and in the 1970s.

Sadly, I suspect we may not be a slick as we wee in the 1980s. Back then the unreason movement hadn't built up and reason was still accepted and used. Today, on that front, we are more like the Weimar Republic - our "art" is anti-art, there has been a sustained assault on reason, and all the things that make a good economy are being demonized as racist. That is what was happening in the late 1880s/1890s that played a massive role in the rampant inflation they went through leasing to the economic collapse that laid the groundwork for the National Socialists to come in and "solve" the problems created by earlier socialists.

As far as the tipping point; in the early 1970/1971 we had Nixon dropping the gold standard (which cratered the value of the dollar). In 2020 we had Democrats forcing the economy into the shitter with lockdowns and millions of household "camps" where you had to be locked away for "public safety". While I would caution against reading too much into it, what became the National Socialist concentration camps started the same way.

As the "Trump economic" showed, the American economy can still be a powerhouse when government gets the hell out of the way. This is what we need. As history shows, when government gets off the back of the capitalism and its economy, it can turn around over the span of but a few years. But also as history shows, we do seem to need a strong leader committed to making that happen to galvanize the people into ensuring it.

And, frankly, I don't see any on the horizon in any party.

Inflation never seems to be something an administration worries about. It just ends in more inflation from attempting to do something about it. Voters have short memories when politicians make promises before elections.
Suppose government, rather than pretending to borrow money, just printed it, inflating the money supply, and letting the present citizens pay back through loss of purchasing power without pretending that future generations will somehow not notice that the present generation have already spent some of their incomes. I doubt that even with government spending without future debt that the citizens would still vote for the same soothsaying idiots like exist at present.

And it is mostly shit that came from their own mouths.

So THAT'S why their brown...thanks to the tip!

Laughing...maybe there is a connection. Loss of gray matter, maybe? or as the meme states...do to no brains, no brain freeze!